1,417 research outputs found
Religious Service Attendance and Volunteering: A Growth Curve Analysis
Despite methodological advances in studying the relationship between religious attendance and volunteering, its dynamic nature still needs to be elucidated. We apply growth curve modeling to examine whether trajectories of religious attendance and volunteering are related to each other over a 15-year period in a nationally representative sample from the Americans’ Changing Lives data (1986-2002). Multivariate results showed that the rates of change in religious attendance and volunteering were positively related, and excluding religious volunteering did not alter the finding. It was also found that the initial level of religious attendance was positively associated with the rate of increase in volunteer hours over the period. Mediation analyses revealed that participation in voluntary associations explained the dynamic relationships between religious attendance and volunteering. These results provide evidence that involvement in organized religion and volunteering are dual activities that change together over the adult life course
Kaons in Dense Half-Skyrmion Matter
Dense hadronic matter at low temperature is expected to be in crystal and at
high density make a transition to a {\em chirally restored but color-confined}
state which is a novel phase hitherto unexplored. This phase transition is
predicted in both skyrmion matter in 4D and instanton matter in 5D, the former
in the form of half-skyrmions and the latter in the form of half-instantons or
dyons. We predict that when 's are embedded in this half-skyrmion or
half-instanton (dyonic) matter which may be reached not far above the normal
density, there arises an enhanced attraction from the soft dilaton field
figuring for the trace anomaly of QCD and the Wess-Zumino term. This attraction
may have relevance for a possible strong binding of anti-kaons in dense nuclear
matter and for kaon condensation in neutron-star matter. Such kaon property in
the half-skyrmion phase is highly non-perturbarive and may not be accessible by
low-order chiral perturbation theory. Relevance of the half-skyrmion or dyonic
matter to compact stars is discussed.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figure
Tying Knots With Communities: Youth Involvement in Scouting and Civic Engagement in Adulthood
Using data from a nationally representative sample of American adult males (N = 2,512), this study examines (a) whether duration of membership in the Boy Scouts of America is associated with adult civic engagement and (b) whether five characteristics of positive youth development (confidence, competence, connection, character, and caring) account for the relationship between duration of Scouting membership and adult civic engagement. The results from structural equation modeling indicate that duration of participation in Scouting is positively associated with four indicators of civic engagement: community involvement, community volunteering, community activism, and environmental activism. Among the five positive characteristics, confidence and competence were found to fully mediate the effects of Scouting on all four types of civic engagement, whereas the other three only to partly mediate the effects
Role of thermal friction in relaxation of turbulent Bose-Einstein condensates
In recent experiments, the relaxation dynamics of highly oblate, turbulent
Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) was investigated by measuring the vortex decay
rates in various sample conditions [Phys. Rev. A , 063627 (2014)] and,
separately, the thermal friction coefficient for vortex motion was
measured from the long-time evolution of a corotating vortex pair in a BEC
[Phys. Rev. A , 051601(R) (2015)]. We present a comparative analysis of
the experimental results, and find that the vortex decay rate is
almost linearly proportional to . We perform numerical simulations of
the time evolution of a turbulent BEC using a point-vortex model equipped with
longitudinal friction and vortex-antivortex pair annihilation, and observe that
the linear dependence of on is quantitatively accounted for
in the dissipative point-vortex model. The numerical simulations reveal that
thermal friction in the experiment was too strong to allow for the emergence of
a vortex-clustered state out of decaying turbulence.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figure
Eagle Scouts: Merit beyond the Badge
Previous studies have shown that participation in Scouting produces better citizens.6 And, there is no shortage of examples or anecdotal accounts that would affirm these findings. Surprisingly, however, there is very little scientific evidence to confirm the prosocial benefits associated with Scouting or earning the rank of Eagle Scout. Thus, the central question of this study is to determine if participation in Scouting and ultimately becoming an Eagle Scout is associated with prosocial behavior and positive youth development that carries over into young adulthood and beyond
Metastable hard-axis polar state of a spinor Bose-Einstein condensate under a magnetic field gradient
We investigate the stability of a hard-axis polar state in a spin-1
antiferromagnetic Bose-Einstein condensate under a magnetic field gradient,
where the easy-plane spin anisotropy is controlled by a negative quadratic
Zeeman energy . In a uniform magnetic field, the axial polar state is
dynamically unstable and relaxes into the planar polar ground state. However,
under a field gradient , the excited spin state becomes metastable down to
a certain threshold and as decreases below , its intrinsic
dynamical instability is rapidly recalled. The incipient spin excitations in
the relaxation dynamics appear with stripe structures, indicating the
rotational symmetry breaking by the field gradient. We measure the dependences
of on and the sample size, and we find that is highly
sensitive to the field gradient in the vicinity of , exhibiting power-law
behavior of with . Our results
demonstrate the significance of the field gradient effect in the quantum
critical dynamics of spinor condensates.Comment: 8 pages, 7 figure
Final Evaluation Report: A Randomized Controlled Trial of the Effectiveness of a Responsible Fatherhood Program: The Case of TYRO Dads
Despite the growing number of responsible fatherhood programs, only a few of them have been evaluated based on a randomized controlled trial. To fill this gap in evaluation research on fatherhood programs, we conducted a single-blind, randomized, controlled trial to assess the effectiveness of an Ohio-based fatherhood program called “TYRO Dads” in improving the father-child relationship among low-income, primarily unmarried, nonresidential fathers.
We collected data from 252 fathers who participated in the study at 17 research sites in eight cities in Ohio by conducting a survey three times between February 2015 and September 2016: before the intervention (pretest), immediately after the intervention (post-test), and three months after the intervention (follow-up). Study participants were randomly assigned to two groups: 137 in the intervention or treatment group who took “TYRO Dads,” a five-week fatherhood course (which consists of 10 sessions of 20 hours in total; i.e., two two-hour sessions per week) and 115 in the control group who only were offered the opportunity to attend an informational session about employment resources and other resources available to help them achieve their goals.
The primary outcomes of interest include fathers’ reports of satisfaction with parenting their child and the frequency of father-child activities. Also measured were secondary outcomes of intervention: fathers’ parenting efficacy, role identity, coparenting relationship with their child’s mother, and perceived challenges in parenting
Competition between structural distortion and magnetic moment formation in fullerene C
We investigated the effect of on-site Coulomb interactions on the structural
and magnetic ground state of the fullerene C based on
density-functional-theory calculations within the local density approximation
plus on-site Coulomb corrections (LDA+). The total energies of the high
symmetry () and distorted () structures of C were
calculated for different spin configurations. The ground state configurations
were found to depend on the forms of exchange-correlation potentials and the
on-site Coulomb interaction parameter , reflecting the subtle nature of the
competition between Jahn-Teller distortion and magnetic instability in
fullerene C. While the non-magnetic state of the distorted
structure is robust for small , a magnetic ground state of the undistorted
structure emerges for larger than 4 eV when the LDA
exchange-correlation potential is employed.Comment: 4 figures, 1 tabl
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